The Book of Fire Read Online Free PDF

flutter of wings broke the silence, and small flocks of birds whirled in to settle among the seed. Off among the trees, Erde saw the deer waiting. And then something else caught her eye.
    “Raven, Doritt, look . . . on the other side of the pond. See that odd bunch of sticks?” The sticks formed a tall but neatly rounded pile, very like something she’d seen before. “Doesn’t it look like . . .?”
    “Windfall,” said Doritt. “No, too neat. Someone’s brush pile.”
    “No one would be cutting wood in the Grove,” Raven countered.
    Then Erde remembered. “I know! It’s . . .”
    “Like a beaver lodge,” Raven murmured. “Hmmm.”
    “Oh, my,” said Doritt. “Could it be . . . do you suppose . . .?”
    “Got to be.”
    The two women dropped their empty sacks and hurried around the pond. Erde followed close behind. The pile was larger than it had seemed from across the water, but much smaller and more hastily thrown-together than the one she’d seen before, on the quiet shore of a lake. No soft moss climbed these walls and no comforting smoke coiled up from the center of the roof. Raven circled around to the far side.
    “Aha!” she exclaimed, and stepped forward briskly to knock on a crude wood-plank door set among the twigs.
    “He won’t answer, you know,” offered Erde faintly, drawing on her own brief experience, now intensely recalled.
    Raven smiled and knocked again. “He will for me.”
    Erde thought this rather overconfident, even for Raven. “Hal practically had to beat the door down.”
    Raven grinned. “That’s always been Hal’s problem.”
    “What’s he doing here is the real question.” Doritt leaned in worriedly to peer at the door.
    “Exactly what we’re going to find out.” Raven knocked a third time, no louder than the first. “Are you there, Gerrasch? Open up, dear soul—you have visitors!”
    A wild rustling and grunting erupted inside, making the stick pile shudder. Erde took a long step backward. The plank door cracked open. In the narrow darkness, she saw a familiar pair of beady eyes above a shiny damp nose.
    “About time!” the darkness growled.
    Raven trilled her musical laugh. “Well, now, sweet, if you neglect to announce your arrival, you can’t expect your welcome to be spectacular and timely!”
    Doritt leaned farther into the doorway. “Hallo, Gerrasch, old thing. What brings you all this way?”
    “Cold. Cold cold cold cold.”
    “Is it warmer here, then, than out there?” Raven raised an eyebrow at her companions.
    “Yes. No. No food, no food. Hungry. A big snow coming.”
    “You came to the right place—we’ve food enough to share.”
    “Big
big
snow. Scared.”
    “What? You? In your cozy lakeside burrow?” Raven crouched to bring her nose level with the beady eyes. “Scared of a little snow?”
    “No! No, no. Listen! Men. Horses. Burned my house. No home. All gone.”
    “Men burned your house?” The women traded glances. Erde recalled that dark and smoky hovel, hidden in the curl of a brush-choked cove, crammed to its twiggy rafters with jars and bottles and herbs and . . . well,
stuff
. How awful for him to lose all those years of collecting.
    “What men?” asked Doritt.
    But Erde shuddered, remembering a terrified woman tied to a stake in a far-off market town. She didn’t need to ask what men. Who else was going around burning everything in sight?
    “Guillemo,” muttered Raven darkly.
    “Want to burn
me
!” The planks creaked and swung inward. A furry, long-nailed hand gripped the doorframe, then Gerrasch’s shaggy, rag-draped bulk filled the opening and Erde recalled why she’d first thought he was some kind of gigantic beaver. “Want to burn me!”
    “Poor creature!” murmured Raven.
    “Burn us all if he could,” Doritt remarked. “How’d you get away?”
    Gerrasch’s bright eyes, until now fixed entirely on Raven, shifted to the older woman with a crafty squint. “Run run. Scurry. Around,